Book Recommendation: The Nine Pound Hammer
The Nine Pound Hammer, John Claude Bemis’s first book of his Clockwork Dark series (released just last year), shows a new direction that middle grade/young adult fiction is heading in. It is an adventure story taking place in the 19th century South where swamps, nearly endless forests, and very odd but interesting people tend to rule. At the start of the book, the twelve-year-old orphan Ray sneaks away from his sister and fellow orphans who are being taken to new homes on an ornate train. He is following the pull of a loadstone that his father gave him before disappearing years go. The loadstone will help him, his father said, and Ray believes in it enough to wander for days without food or shelter in a wilderness. Ray eventually meets up with a traveling medicine show and learns about the Gog, a person of tremendous evil who intends to rule the world through an all-powerful machine. No one knows what the machine is, though a previous one was destroyed by John Henry. Bemis peels back myths to reveal an alternative reality, a world of powerful yet secretive Ramblers and the Gog’s demonic agents. Their battles are the backdrop of many American tales with the fate of the world in the balance.
Colorful young characters richly populate The Nine Pound Hammer: Conker, the gigantic son of John Henry, gains new power when he holds the Nine Pound Hammer that once belonged to his father; Si, the stern Chinese escape artist, uses what appeared to her family as a deformation on her hand as a map through any place; the quiet and sensitive Redfeather, whose true Native American name no one can pronounce, knows how to walk through fire without being burnt and uses this skill to great advance at the novel’s climax; and Jolie, a part-siren, whose voice the Gog wants in order to control a group of mankind to feed his machine, wavers between self-sacrifice and the self-preservation to which others have already given their lives.
The book is fast-paced and interesting, though with a great deal of back story told to Ray through monologues by other characters. Fortunately, it is interesting back story, but I still wish Bemis had found more ways to show it than simply tell it. But with so much explained, I expect the next book to go right on with the story, and it is a fun story indeed. We are all about reading and discussing at the Maine Humanities Council, and I think this would garner some fascinating insights on the nature of Man versus Machine from the under-thirteen crowd.
(Recommended by Diane Magras)
